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No, the Byrds didn't originally write that. And when Pete Seeger composed Turn! Turn! Turn! years before the iconic '60s folk-rock group made it a hit, he put to music the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes. And that famous verse was cited again last week, this time by a billionaire financier.

That is, the private-equity giant is a net seller because things simply can't get much better. "We think it's a fabulous environment to be selling," he says, noting Apollo has sold about $13 billion in assets in the past 15 months. "We're selling everything that's not nailed down. And if we're not selling, we're refinancing."

That's because there has never been such a good time to borrow -- which is raising warning flags for Black. "The financing market is as good as we have ever seen it. It's back to 2007 levels. There is no institutional memory," he observed, referring to the peak of the last credit bubble. That was when then-Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince famously said that as long as the music was playing, bankers had to keep dancing -- which they did, with disastrous consequences when the band stopped.

Black's perspective is rooted in his long experience, which has encompassed the credit booms and busts of the past three decades of financial history. It started with Drexel Burnham (whose junk-bond unit was headed by Michael Milken, at whose eponymously named conference Black spoke) which helped the nascent junk-bond market come of age in the 1980s -- before the market's bust with Drexel's demise and Milken's conviction on securities violations. Black co-founded Apollo shortly thereafter, in 1990. Then came the dot-com bubble and bust at the turn of the 21st century, which was followed by the housing bubble and bust.

Black evidently is wary not only because he's seen this movie before and knows how it ends; he's lived it. Prices for his investments never have been better, while borrowing never has been anywhere near as cheap. But private-equity investors need a finely honed sense of value. And others at the Milken confab admitted to having trouble finding investments at reasonable prices -- even with the unprecedentedly low cost of capital bringing down hurdle rates -- because of inflated asset values.

There are precedents for private-equity titans picking propitious times to sell.
Blackstone Group's
bx 0.8554176450855417%Blackstone Group L.P.U.S.: NYSEUSD30.065
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:
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P/E Ratio
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18812299452.9371
Dividend Yield
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2194980More quote details and news »bxinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(BX) initial public offering nearly six years ago marked the peak of the buyout boom, as Andrew Bary suggested at the time in a Barron's cover story ("Top of the Market," June 25, 2007), still available at barrons.com. Blackstone's shares came public at $31 and traded as high as $38 in its debut -- and never saw those prices again. The stock plunged to around $4 at the nadir of the crisis in early 2009; and though it has recovered steadily with the bull market, hitting a 52-week high Friday of $21.98, it is still 29% below the IPO price. That's part of the definition of successful investing -- buy low, sell high -- an eternal verity, even if it doesn't come from the Bible.

THAT THE MARKET FOR FINANCING has never been this good was evident in the land rush of corporate and government borrowers -- from blue chips to cow chips in terms of pedigree -- into whose hands investors were eager to thrust their money.

Appleaapl 1.9019800214056368%Apple Inc.U.S.: NasdaqUSD114.2525
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:
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P/E Ratio
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597858946891.729
Dividend Yield
1.9953354657751834% Rev. per Employee
1846780More quote details and news »aaplinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(AAPL) stole the show with its record $17 billion blowout deal that had corporate bond investors lined up the way iPhone buyers once queued up for the latest iteration. As a result of a reported $50 billion in orders for the securities, the cult company from Cupertino was able to borrow at vanishingly low interest rates -- as little as 0.45% for three-year, fixed-rate debt -- to return some $100 billion in cash to its shareholders by the end of 2015. Apple also avoided as much as $9.2 billion in taxes by borrowing instead of repatriating its $145 billion hoard of cash, mostly held abroad, a Moody's analyst told Bloomberg News. Meanwhile, the underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, pocketed $53.25 million in fees for peddling the bonds, which sold themselves, as evidenced by their generating nearly $3 in orders for every $1 of securities sold. Nice work if you can get it.

Other gilt-edged credits also took advantage of the generous terms on offer, such as
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:
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P/E Ratio
13.521971573868823Market Cap
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Dividend Yield
3.3751205400192865% Rev. per Employee
212324More quote details and news »ibminYour ValueYour ChangeShort position
(IBM), which matched Apple's 0.45% three-year borrowing tab, while setting a record low of 1.625% for a seven-year maturity. Equally astounding is what is happening in what is still called the high-yield market, where yields hit a record low of 5.12%, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch High Yield Master Index II.

And the reach for yield extends around the globe. Chinese oil company
CNOOC
(CEO) sold $4 billion in debt last week, for which Bloomberg says it got nearly six times as much in bids, with the bulk going to U.S. asset managers. But the biggest beneficiaries of this blind frenzy have been governments that not long ago were virtual pariahs in the capital markets, such as Rwanda, as noted here last week. In addition, Slovenia -- which was thought just weeks ago to be a candidate to follow in the footsteps of Cyprus as a euro-zone catastrophe -- was able to borrow $3.5 billion, despite seeing its credit rating cut below investment grade. And Slovenia received $16 billion in bids for those bonds -- equal to nearly one-third of its gross domestic product -- for five-year securities yielding 4.95% and 10-year bonds yielding 6%.

But compared with other dubious debtors in the euro zone had to offer, those yields seemed positively generous. Yields on benchmark government bonds in Spain and Italy are under 4%, while Portugal's are at 5.50%. And those were high, compared with 10-year German bunds, which hit a record low yield of 1.16% last week.

Investors are falling all over themselves to fund borrowers good, bad, and indifferent. If that reminds you of the subprime-mortgage melt-up of the middle of the last decade, when anybody with a pulse could borrow -- aided and abetted by the capital markets -- it also does to the likes of Leon Black.

THIS DESPERATE REACH FOR YIELD, of course, is a product of central banks' drive to push interest rates to the floor and flood the financial system to drag down borrowing costs for corporations, homeowners or buyers, and second-tier governments, all to spur stagnant economies. Those economies aren't growing because of the effects of the bursting of the previous bubble, which was inflated to offset the bubble before that, but never mind.

The full-court press extended to the European Central Bank, which lowered its key policy rate, as expected, by a quarter of a percentage point, to 0.5%. Mario Draghi, its chief, said the ECB, to spur the banks to expand credit, could conceivably charge them a fee to park their cash at the central bank, instead of paying them interest.

Back in the U.S., the Fed's Open Market Committee said that it could boost or reduce its current $85 billion-a-month securities purchases, depending on the outlook for the economy. Previously, the markets and Fed watchers were wondering mainly about a tapering, instead of a possible increase, in the central bank's bond-buying spree.

All of which has produced the best of all possible worlds for the stock market: Good news is good news, while bad news means continued central-bank money-printing. And with favorable headlines Friday about the U.S. jobs market, major averages hit historic highs.

The markets were surprised by news that nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000 in April, a bit better than the consensus call for a 150,000 increase but a lot better when sharp upward revisions in the two preceding months totaling 114,000 workers were added in. The unemployment rate -- derived from a separate survey of households -- ticked down to 7.5% from 7.6% (actually to 7.51% from 7.57% before rounding to one decimal place), but this time it was because more people had jobs, not because people dropped out of the labor force.

But the details of the jobs report were less cause for exuberance than the stock market displayed. Despite expanded payrolls and a lower official jobless rate, Americans actually worked less last month because of a 0.2- hour drop in the workweek, resulting in total hours worked dropping 0.4% for the month. The U-6 underemployment rate, which covers folks who are working part-time but want full-time gigs or have stopped looking for work, ticked up to 13.9% from 13.8%, the first rise since last July, Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood of the Liscio Report note. And in the household survey, some 306,000 joined the ranks of the self-employed, more than the total 293,000 overall gain.

Says David Rosenberg, chief economist of Gluskin Sheff: "So we had a lot of folks ostensibly becoming consultants working out of their basement offices in April and not exactly picking up much business according to what the income numbers told us for the month," with average weekly earnings off 0.4%.